Student Translation Prize Winners Announced at the University of Oklahoma

World Literature Today (WLT) is pleased to announce the winners of the inaugural University of Oklahoma (OU) Student Translation Prizes: Lucy Coleman in prose and Lala Mammadova in poetry. WLT editor in chief Daniel Simon made the announcement on Tuesday, March 4 at the closing reception for the 2025 Puterbaugh Lit Fest on the OU Norman campus.

This new translation prize—$250 for the winning prose translation and $250 for the winning poetry translation—was made possible by a generous gift from Dr. Alice-Catherine Carls, a longtime World Literature Today contributor and current editorial board member, supplemented by matching contributions from OU’s Dodge Family College of Arts & Sciences and the David L. Boren College of International Studies.

Three OU faculty members—Dr. Emily Johnson (Modern Languages, Literature, and Linguistics), Dr. Mina Raminsabet (International & Area Studies), and Dr. Julie-Françoise Tolliver (English)—judged the longlist of entries, with Dr. Simon as chair of the jury. Final selections were made by a guest judge, Dr. Anne O. Fisher, an OU graduate and award-winning translator from Russian.

Graduate and undergraduate students who have been working on literary translations during the 2024–2025 school year were eligible to enter their work.

Coleman is a graduate student in chemistry at OU from Boise, Idaho. Her language studies fostered in her an appreciation for Chinese literature, and she received the WLT Student Translation Prize for poetry in 2024. She values translation for its role in encouraging cross-cultural exchange and global engagement. She translated an excerpt from “Zhufeng Temple: The Story of the Key and the Stele,” from Chen Chuncheng’s A Submarine in the Night.

Originally from Baku, Azerbaijan, Mammadova is an OU exchange student, a WLT Student Advisory Board officer, and a WLT intern double-majoring in English and American studies and general and comparative literature. She enjoys creative writing and aims to pursue a career in writing and publishing. She translated three poems by the Azerbaijani poet Mirza Ali-Akbar Sabir.

Simon also announced runners-up in each category: Daria Shchukina, for her translation of a story by Russian writer Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin; and Aiden Wilson, for his translation of some Farsi poems by Omar Khayyam. 

Shchukina, an international student from Nizhny Novgorod, Russia, is a senior majoring in English with a concentration in literature and translation studies. After graduation, she hopes to pursue graduate studies, specializing in comparative literature and translation.

From Norman, Oklahoma, Wilson is a history and international studies dual major with a minor in Iranian studies, currently learning Farsi.

At the reception Tuesday evening, Edurne Pineda, head consul of the Consulate of Mexico in Oklahoma City, offered brief remarks, and Guadalupe Nettel, the 2025 Puterbaugh Fellow, was recognized.

World Literature Today, OU’s award-winning magazine of international literature culture, is currently celebrating its ninety-ninth year of continuous publication.